In most of the cities that were centres of intellectual life, the plebeians arose and replaced the formerly highly cultured patricians. The burghers began to tune the melodies of a new music: a banausic artisan song. The comic anecdote and the dramatic farce pleased the people best and, therefore, prevailed. There was a general delight in comical, farcical roles, and such elements were even introduced into religious plays. For example, Saint Mary complains that she has no diapers to protect the Holy Child from frost. Saint Joseph gets into a quarrel with two maids; there is a free fight; vulgar reproaches and blows are exchanged. Darkness begins to spread over Germany. The devil, stupid or otherwise, introduces his spook; sorceresses and hags professing magic skill are everywhere. The defamation of the grand institutions of the Papacy, owing to several unworthy successors of Saint Peter, promotes contempt and ludicrous treatment. The ridiculous fiction of the alleged "Papess" Joanna becomes a farcical subject, but is, nevertheless, jokingly rescued from the claws of the devil. Her story goes thus: a maiden elopes with a priest, her lover, to Rome, dons man's dress, becomes a doctor, a cardinal, and at last a Pope. She is finally ignominiously unmasked, received by the devils in hell, but saved by the intercession of Saint Mary and Saint Nicholas. Dietrich Schernberg treated this strange subject at Muhlhausen, in Thuringia, in his play of _Frau Jutla_. All these morality plays, mysteries, farces, sottises, sacred or profane, are scarcely ever edifying, and this whether they treat of court sessions regarding love troubles, marriage calamities, allegorical figures, fools of love, women, wicked monks, or quacks. Here, a maiden leads her lovers by the nose; there, lovers present themselves before Lady Venus. An immoderate coarseness and indecency in manner and action is part of the game; even in the presence of women the utmost vulgarity was permitted. Women joined in the most obscene conversation, and it is astonishing to what depths of immodesty their speech descended. Nürnberg was the centre of carnival plays. Hans Rosenblut and Hans Folz, authors of incredibly obscene, though very clever, farces, were the forerunners of the great and lovable Hans Sachs, "Who was a shoe- maker and a poet, too."